Course title in Danish
Course title in English / Digital Innovation, Entrepreneurship and Customer Management
ECTS / 30 ECTS
Department / Department of Management
Study programmes / Cand.merc.
Forms of instruction / Lectures, Class instructions,Case discussions and Supervision
Comments on the forms of instruction / Ordinary lectures, case-based teaching, classroom teaching where students present examples and exercises. Active student participation is required. The course is divided into modules. For each module the student has to submit written assignments. The students will give oral presentations of some of the assignments. The assignments will be done in groups of 3-4 students. The groups should be diverse with respect to background and culture. The students can suggest the group composition. Final group composition will be determined by the coordinator of the particular module.
A study tour including lectures and company visits in collaboration with Columbia University, New York.
Course type / 30 ECTS elite semester.
Description of qualifications /
Innovation, Entrepreneurship and Customer Management are heavily influenced by digitalization. Digitization is rewriting the rules of competition, with incumbent companies most at risk of being left behind. The course will take an outside-in perspective on digitalization.
The Digital Firm is a general term for organizations that have enabled core business relationships with employees, customers, suppliers, and other external partners through digital networks. These digital networks are supported by enterprise class technology platforms that have been leveraged within an organization to support critical business functions and services.The course covers how digitalization effects our current knowledge of firm and firm behavior – from a theoretical perspective and as well as from a practical perspective. This includes:
•How and whydigitalization.
•What challenges accepted theories and practices: Innovation, entrepreneurship, customer and consumer management and finance, etc.
•Which new skills are required of managers and employees in the digital firm, e.g. with respect to innovation, marketing, entrepreneurship, business intelligence and performance management.
The course addressesthese challenges from the perspective of firms that are disrupted by the new technology as well as the disruptor.
In every module, the students use theories, cases, knowledge and skillsto understand and analyze the complex new demand facing existing models in the digital economy. This includes the perspective of network, communities and ecosystems.
Learning objectives:
After following the course students should be able:
•to identify, assess and select between several and relevant digital sources of innovation
•to elaborate and specify how firms can benefit from digital innovation
•to assess digital innovation strategies
•to reflect on how firms potentially change their current strategies, structures and processes for innovation relative to the increase of digitalization.
•to discuss and implement marketing management theories in the new digital reality (via cases)
•to understand future perspectives for developments in the digital value chain
•to see the potential of new data and web analytics for customer and marketing management strategies
•to identify and describe key characteristics of the digital firm
•discuss how classical theories of organization and management apply to the digital firm
•to analyze how digitalization affects firm management including performance management, business intelligence, and resource planning (financial, human, and capital resources)
Syllabus / Not relevant.
Academic prerequisites / A bachelor’s degree in Business or Economics with an average grade of 7. Basic knowledge of organization, organization behaviour, HR, statistics and ICT. As prerequisite for attending one or more modules, it is expected that the student is motivated to independently study some topics in order to achieve a sufficient academic level required by the module. E.g., it might be necessary for students that has not studied marketing courses at a masters level to study independently some marketing topics at master level for the module in Marketing, Customer and Value Chain Management.
See more details in the “Maximum enrolment” section below.
Period: / To be offered in the autumn semester 2016.
Hours – weeks – periods / The course is divided into a number of modules that deals with specific areas of the digital firm. The modules are taught sequentially. A module can be one or more weeks. There will be 12 teaching hours per week except for the week of the study tour. The honors course is challenging and a considerable amount of preparation and group work outside class hours should be expected.
Contents / Module 1: The Digital Firm (two weeks)
Challenges and opportunities:
Digital Technologies are changing the business world in a variety of different ways, and the design, creation and marketing of digital products is of increasing importance to many industries, not just limited to those commonly thought of as “high-tech.” Further, the internal operation of the firm are now digitalized allowing for different organization, employment and outsourcing. Module one will involve a number of case discussions to illustrate these ideas, along with lectures.
The module will present a framework for analyzing digitalization both from the point of view of the disruptor and the disrupted.
Digital Platforms:
Various digital platforms that were discussed in the cases will be introduced both from a technical and a managerial perspective.
From a technological perspective, they define the information and communication infrastructure of the entity and they enable new ways to digitize processes.
From a managerial perspective, they facilitate new coordination and communication within and across entities, enable new organizational forms, change the information environment underlying the business, and permit new incentive and monitoring structures.
It will include web, cloud and mobile platforms. From a management point of view, it will cover Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Supply Chain Management (SCM), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Knowledge Management System (KMS), Enterprise Content Management (ECM), and Warehouse Management System (WMS) among others. The purpose of these technology platforms is to digitally enable seamless integration and information exchange within the organization to employees and outside the organization to customers, suppliers, and other business partners. In particular, it will be discussed how these platforms affect the basic economic transaction.
Performance Management and Analytics
The digital economy opens up new opportunities to capture and analyze data in ways unthought-of before. How can performance data be used to deliver new insights that drive ever better service? Techniques and metrics for analyzing data provided by the various digital platforms will be covered from the point of view of managing performance.
Module 2: Innovation and business development in the digital economy (four weeks)
The new digital ecosystem obliges us to think of any entrepreneurial initiative in a very different manner to how we have traditionally done.
Increasingly competition is played out not between firms or even supply chains, but instead between ecosystems. The strategic debate centers on how to shape and influence ecosystems using partnerships, platforms and technologies. This includes designing and delivering world-class services - in this open economy, where power lies in the hands of customers and consumers, and where creating great service experiences is a key organizational capability. How to design personalized services that you can deliver seamlessly and efficiently to multiple customers is a key question. We see shift from products to solutions; from outputs to outcomes. Increasingly customers are demanding that their providers deliver to them the outcomes they value rather than products and services. How do you make this organizational transformation, focusing on service and solutions, rather than products and outputs? What new capabilities do you need to innovate your business model?
This module will cover the following topics:
- Industrial organization in digital markets: Competition, entry, market structure, network externalities, two-sided markets)
- Disruptive technologies and innovation: Incumbents vs. entrants, why incumbents underestimate entrants with new technologies, what are disruptive technologies pros and cons?
- Innovation in ecosystems: Do networks and ecosystems solve the innovator’s dilemma of disruption?
- Search and selection (Types and models of innovation in the digital economy): Open innovation, open science, and markets for technologies and ideas.
- Digital communities and technology platforms (Online social networks and innovation)
- Crowdfunding and digital business development (Business models and idea realization in the digital economy)
Module 3: Study tour: Technology Management (one week)
Visiting Columbia University with two days of intensive teaching on Technology Management and visiting companies with a focus on Technology Management.
Module 4: : Marketing, Customer and Value Chain Management (four weeks)
The digital development has already changed today’s business environment and ecosystems in many ways. In the future, it will become even more essential to understand how ‘New Media’, digital communication and data access can be used as an asset for relationship management and marketing actions. In this module existing theories and models will be challenged and discussed in terms of new digital platforms and the impact on customer and value chain management and marketing strategies.
This will include:
Customer Relationship Management - new ways to manage relationships in the digital business environment
Supply Chain Management – the importance of IT in the supply chain collaboration and for future digital networking
Digital Marketing and Social Media perspectives – for the digital ecosystem to understand how New Media influence business practices and performances in the future.
Web-analytics – what goes on in the virtual digital world and how to benefit from data and the knowledge it provides regarding customers and consumers.
Mobile Marketing – it sounds very simple BUT Mobile Technology and Apps have already had a huge impact in relation to changing behavior patterns among consumers across the world. What are the implications for the well-known understanding of consumer and customer behavior in the light of future digital and mobile marketing
Module 5: The Nature of the Firm in the Digital Age (one week)
Transaction costs decrease dramatically in the digital age. As transaction costs decrease, the value of services relative to products increases. That is because one of the key selling points of a product is that it eliminates future transaction costs once it has been purchased. Software as a service, media as a service, transportation as a service, manufacturing as a service—these are the engines driving economic growth in a digital economy. Their rise to prominence entails a shift to consumption economics, a world in which risk has been transferred from buyer to seller.
Low-cost operational excellence based on supply-chain efficiencies is becoming so sufficiently universal that is no longer a strategy for differentiation in a developed economy. It will still be possible to differentiate on price, but that will largely be based on revamping sales, marketing, and distribution processes leveraging big data and analytics—factors beyond the bill of materials.
This module summarizes the course and present an analytic and theoretical framework for analyzing the effects of digitalization. This includestheoretical elements from: transaction economics, property rights, risk management, agency theory and financial management.
Lecturer / BørgeObel (coordinator), Andrea Carugati, Anders RyomVilladsen, Jacob Eskildsen, Michael S. Dahl, Lars Frederiksen, Karen Brunsø and Charles Snow.
Language of instruction / English
Academic term / Cand.mercthird semester.
Literature / Adner, R., & Kapoor, R. (2010). Value creation in innovation ecosystems: How the structure of technological interdependence affects firm performance in new technology generations. Strategic Management Journal, 31(3), 306-333.
Bharadwaj A, El Sawy OA, Pavlou PA, Venkatraman N. 2013. Digital business strategy: toward a next generation of insights. MIS Quarterly 37 (2): 471-482
Brynjolfsson E, McAfee A. 2014. The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies .W.W. Norton & Company: New York
Chaffey, D. Ellis-Chadwick, F., Mayer R. & Johnston, K. Internet Marketing,4th ed. (Person Education, Harlow, England: Prentice Hall, 2009).
Dougherty D, Dunne DD. 2012. Digital science and knowledge boundaries in complex innovation. Organization Science 23 (5): 1467-1484
Dyer, J. H., Gregersen, H. B., & Christensen, C. M. (2009). The innovator’s DNA. Harvard Business Review, 87(12), 60-67.
Edelmann, D. C. (2011) ‘Branding in the Digital Age’ Harvard Business Review, 88 (12): 62-69.
Fawcett, S. E., Wallin, C., Allred, C., Fawcett, A. M., & Magnan, G. M. (2011) ’Information Technology as an Enabler of Supply Chain Collaboration: A Dynamic-Capabilities Perspective’, Journal of Supply Chain management, 47 (1): 38-59.
Franzoni, C., & Sauermann, H. (2014). Crowd science: The organization of scientific research in open collaborative projects. Research Policy, 43(1), 1-20.
Gawer, A. (2014). Bridging differing perspectives on technological platforms: Toward an integrative framework. Research Policy 43(7), 1239-1249.
George Westerman, Didier Bonnet, Andrew McAfee, 2014,Leading Digital: Turning Technology into Business Transformation, HBRPress
Hoffman, D. & Fodor, M. (2010) ‘Can you measure the ROI of Your Social Media Marketing?’, MIT Sloan Management Review, 41-49.
Kaplan S, Tripsas M. 2008. Thinking about technology: Applying a cognitive lens to technical change. Research Policy 37 (5): 790-805
Keen P, Williams R. 2013. Value architectures for digital business: beyond the business model. MIS Quarterly 37 (2): 643-647
King, A. A., & Baatartogtokh, B. (2015). How useful is the theory of disruptive innovation? MIT Sloan Management Review, 57(1), 77-90.
Mollick, E. (2014). The dynamics of crowdfunding: An exploratory study. Journal of Business Venturing, 29(1), 1-16.
Poetz, Marion K., and Martin Schreier. "The value of crowdsourcing: can users really compete with professionals in generating new product ideas?." Journal of Product Innovation Management 29, no. 2 (2012): 245-256.
Porter ME, Heppelmann JE. 2014. How Smart, Connected Products are Transforming Competition. Harvard Business Review 92 (11): 64-88
Reinartz. R., Krafft, M., & Hoyer, W. D. (2004) The Customer Relationship management Process: Its measurement and Impact on performance’ Journal of Marketing Research, XLI (August): 293-305.
Yoo, Y., Boland Jr, R. J., Lyytinen, K., & Majchrzak, A. (2012). Organizing for innovation in the digitized world. Organization Science, 23(5), 1398-1408.
Maximum enrolment / The course is offered under the rules of “Talentforløbet/Excellence ved Aarhus Universitet” that can award the student a degree with first-class honours (Graduation with distinction). It is offered to students in all MSc in Economics and Business Administration programmeswith the exemption of MSc in Accounting and Auditing, where special rules apply.
A bachelor’s degree in Business or Economics with an average grade of 7 is required.
A maximum of 20 students will be accepted.
A written application will be the basis for individual evaluation in order to accepting the student to the course where following criteria will be taking into consideration:
- Motivation
- How the student see digital transformation relate to the “major” chosen.
- Knowledge and previous interest in digitalization.
Location / The course is taught in Aarhus.
Exam Details
Form of examination / Oral exam
Examiner(s) / External co-examination: the exam is assessedby the examiner and one or more external co-examiners appointed by the ministry.
Assessment / 7-point marking scale
Notes / The oral exam is based on a random selection of two of the written assignments. The written assignments mustbe done in groups, but the oral exam is individual.
The length of written assignments is4-6 pages.
Prerequisites for exam participation / The course is divided into 5 modules. For each module a participation in an exercise is required to demonstrate that the actual skills and knowledge can be used in the context of the digital firm. The participation in the exercise is documented in an assignment report of 4-6 pages. The student can only participate in the oral exam if all assignment reports are submitted and if the student has held the group presentations in class.
Exam duration / The oral exam will last for approximately 30 minutes.
Preparation time
Exam language / Assignments must be written in English and presentation must also be held in English. The individual oral exam can be passed in Danish if the examiner agrees.
Aids / All
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